


To End (In A Whisper)

by billspilledquill



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French Revolution RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Intimacy, M/M, Mentions of Prostitution, Not Really Character Death, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-24 19:44:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16181897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Somehow, intimacy needed him to do exactly that to get away from it.





	To End (In A Whisper)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ethike_arete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethike_arete/gifts).



> Anything I have written in the past days has belonged in the garbage— but I managed to write a ~~somehow~~ decent one for now (in between numerous 5 minutes coffee breaks), because I need to address the very important issue of Ethike_arete’s writing. 
> 
> I know I am basically offering him the writing equivalent of a rotten apple, but I absolutely needed to dedicate something to him because his writing is just djskncids. The lesson of this story is to read _Les Saisons_ \- go, go, go. 
> 
> Anyway here, enjoy this 2k+ character study on Saint-Just’s last thoughts, with a good ol’ post-modernist touch and Virginia Woolf who will be disappointed in me if she ever saw this.

 

 _Monsieur_ , he wrote, back in the days he can still write that, _monsieur. J’embrasse votre épouse, vos enfants et vous._

And so it went on, with promises of kissing and embrace, that letters were written.

Saint-Just liked intimacy, intimate in a way where you can bend over someone’s shoulder, bend your head, and bend your voice, bend it all— time and space and all else in between and end it— but never in a whisper.

Whispering was scary. It was something you do when you wanted to smear honey and ink and love in their ears, slowly inducing them drop by drop, while everyone else watched, wondered, and thought. Whispering was a crime, an offense, because intimacy was a wonderfully written thing; it was Horace, it was Racine, but never, in this day and age, he would love so restrained and conspicuous. He wrote about it, of course, as everyone had written nowadays, how blood can mingle, how final consummations were made, how to love and die and how to start again— but never a matter like whispering.

Too small a thing, too prosperous in its literary success, too little to add. It was slower than a hand in hair, stiller than a warm bosom. The shivers that ran down to his spine, the need to hear it a little longer, to continue this small intimacy within his arm’s length.

The first time someone whispered to him, though, was his sister, stealing milk from their neighbor. Her eyes shone with pride, he was barely taller than her; she leaned toward him, her teeth unevenly spelled out, she whispered with a country-side French and an Alsace tinge he was so fond of:

“Brother, don’t you think milk will make the cows suffer?”

It surprised him, how she could do a thing such as whispering, he was barely older, and he never would have thought; he didn’t remember what he replied, it was always so difficult to remember when the whispering reached your ears like wind and water and sun and turned your head to the syllables and not to the answer itself.

It was, perhaps, reasonable enough: _But Louise, all things do._

“Louis-Antoine,” Camille said. His hands curled around a cup of coffee. Saint-Just blinked, feeling a little more than tired.

“Please,” he said. “Just call me Antoine.”

The Palais-Royal. The café where Camille made his little history, myth, and prompt further to his death. Saint-Just was in a pain, then, he was pained at where this was going; early on, he had wished to make history himself. But he realized they were just a cheaper paper, a louder voice, a thunderstorm, never a whisper. Saint-Just was neither of those things.

Camille, in all fairness, was. And he himself knew it, as he ought to.

A laugh. “Our dear _könig_ wouldn’t like to hear that, mon cher Antoine.” Wild curls shifted while he took a sip of his coffee. He almost choked on his own drink when Camille started, grabbed his wrists in that frenzy way of his. His eyes were wide open, a depth with which all rational things fall apart. Saint-Just began to think of Louise, her eyes caught the milk the same way Camille caught him.

“I have been reading, Antoine,” he says, his voice soft and combustible. “It’s the most dangerous thing to do, these days.”

“You like dangerous maneuvers.”

“I do,” he grinned, and leaning back a little, his fingers trailed on his wrists, around and about the veins. “That’s why I write too.”

“I have read it. Truly something unique, if you can’t count the number of booming journals repeating you.”

“Ah, well,” he said, close to pouting. “I do not wish to make a personality of myself, but you will have to admit that my attacks are well put. Some scoundrels can’t seem to understand my subtlety.”

“Your radicalism, you mean,” he let a smile at that.

“It’s the fashion of the day, Antoine. I am only giving the people what it wants.”

“ _Ochlos_ , not _demos_ , then.”

“It’s a bet, you know how it works.”

“Nothing more useless than to throw your life into a meaningless bargain,” he warned, the veins throbbing beneath them. A pause, then, “I have always admired you.”

“I know you do,” Camille said. “You won’t bother without admiration or reverence. You preach too much. We shouldn’t be friends if we are that similar.”

“We shouldn’t,” he agreed. He wanted to retreat his arm, but Camille just approached closer by the pull; it was magnitude, really, at how similar they were. They should be repulsed by each other, binding only by laws from whatever scientific discoveries. Camille pressed his lips to his ear-shells. He can feel his smile from each and every movement.

“But isn’t preaching a way to find salvation?” He whispered, suddenly air filling his lungs were Camille’s, not his. “Do we not admire the same people that will kill us, as a way to avoid suffering on our own?”

Camille jumped, finishing his sentence in the same usual spiritual manner, made an off-handed salute, and he was gone, just like that, without paying for his coffee. A green leaf fell into it, painting it bitter. In a distance that whispers don’t offer, Saint-Just remembered his answer; of course.

A girl offered him a tricolor cockade. She said he was as pretty as a blooming pear tree. Saint-Just was remembering then, of hope, and that answer so, so long ago.

It was, alternately enough, familiarly so: _But Camille, all things do._

He remembered, as he went, during that regrettable trip to Paris in his youth, to a brothel.

Whorehouse, whorehouse was more accurate. Not because it was full of whores, but because it was a house, and for some, home. The paint was peeling off, the walls fainting in the sun. It was a stormy day, a spring full of leaves.

Some girls, with heavy makeups and skirts riding above their knees, had dragged him into it. To be totally fair, he was being lead willingly, at that time where money was lacking, he didn’t had much thought for anything.

A girl that called herself Violette spoke to him. Her voice loud with contempt.

“Are ye hearing?” She asked, speaking l’argot so well. Saint-Just was fascinated by the move of her lips, that new language submerging in his own country, “Nay, ye couldn’t no more!”

Her eyes were that deep shade of brown that it was almost red. She let out an indignant gasp when he found himself just staring into that, and nothing else. He didn’t have any money.

And so she clasped her hands together and held them out, undressing him with a mild discontent. Saint-Just stopped her, he didn’t have any money.

“Do you think I am more well off than you?” He asked, trailing after her red, red, blood cheeks. “My sister could be you, Louise is a little older.”

He tucked her dress down, thinking about Thérèse. “My wife could a little younger, my child.”

When he looked up, that girl had flushed a brighter red, that even the makeup couldn’t make her ugly. She had taken his hand on her dress and placed it on her cheek. It was beautiful, even then, the ugly and the dirt and the makeup, the feeling of burn.

She reeked of alcohol when she rested her head on his shoulder. Her voice carried so little; it made his whole body shook. She was whispering something, about god, salvation, and money. He couldn’t whisper back that he had none of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, almost screaming compared to it. “I don’t have money.”

She lifted her head, her big red eyes blooming. “Ye, ye! Poor man, ye need god,” she replied, making a cross, pitching her fingers together. “All things do, ye?”

And she looked at him with that red eyes, glimmering under her white paint. He buried his hands in his coat’s pocket, managed to find some sous and gave it to her.

“Yes,” he said, watching her eyes following the coins. “Yeah.”

She smiled, a goddess, phosphene and yellow teeth.

The sous dropped with her too impatient grabbing, and they both crouched down to get them, her perruque fell off, her blonde hair draped in gold, reaching for that copper.

Behind that, behind this, behind all this remembering, her red eyes and white face, he can hear the sound of some political speech raging in the background. He was twenty, then, and twenty-three now. Still, he can hear that speech being said, in the Assembly, at the Convention, in Robespierre’s house.

In Robespierre’s room.

“Virtue,” Maximilien said, and all changed back to where it began, “is primordial.”

His head was heavy, engrossed in that memory. Chaos. Bosch's _Il giardino da sogni_. Eve eating her breasts out.

“How much for a cut?” He asked to Maximilien with his head tipped to a side, his own hair trapped inside a wig. Are they blond? “Ah,” he said. “Pardon, I was only remembering. I thought you were my barber.”

Maximilien, Maxime. That man had always been too much. To say Robespierre felt too distant, to say Maximilien felt too much like a friend, to say Maxime felt struck, a word out from the world. Saint-Just settled on calling him a barber.

There were many things to be said here: about his mission, about Maximilien’s mission. About France, about Sparta, about glory and how Cicero died; how _they_ will die. “Maximilien,” he said. _My very dear friend_.

Somehow, intimacy needed him to do exactly that to get away from it.

He cut his hair before stealing money and rampaging in Paris; he took that iron pair of scissors that his father once owned and later died, he had cut his hair carelessly, as young men do often. Youth then when he believed in nothing, youth now when he believed in everything. A youth, if nothing else.

“Saint-Just?” A bubble burst. “Are you well?”

“I am dying.”

Maximilien tilted his head, then, his lids heavy with sleep, “What’s more to it?”

Saint-Just thought he understood it back then. Robespierre was in his room, as an understanding. Camille was gone, enemies grown. Maximilien looked through his glasses, his eyes rimmed with black shadows. A green, irresistible light, shone days before remembering. What the the purpose of a fiddle when your arms are invalid?

Suddenly it was not the beginning of a long, healthy spring, and yet Maximilien was as lovely as that pear tree that girl called him so long ago. That red and blue and white was lying in his pocket, the needle sometimes pierced his thumb while rubbing on it.

Robespierre listened to him, as always. He didn’t know what he said. He wasn’t even listening to himself.

“What?”

Saint-Just blinked. “Excuse me?”

Maximilien laughed. “You were asking me if cows suffer through farming process,” he said, playing a little with his quill.

“And your answer is?”

Maximilien paused, turned the quill around and around. He was amused. “I suppose they don’t. Though I believe that is not a subject of discussion for tonight.”

Saint-Just didn’t know which day it was. Every day seemed to be important.

“Come,” Robespierre said. He didn’t know who he was referring to: his hound or him. He went anyway. He hated not knowing.

Maximilien was tired, he can see it. All composure seemed to fall away at the lack of distance between them. Saint-Just made another step to the wooden, inclined plank.

How marvelous was him. That girl with red cheeks was whispering, he can hear it. Ye, ye, ye. Isn’t life so much better now, with some sous in your back pocket?

“What if,” he said, his breath at a hair’s length. “I were to die?”

“You will,” he didn’t remember if he had said it, or it was Robespierre. It was a dialogue better spoken back and forth. “So will I.”

 _Virtue is primordial, but what about terror?_ He thought. _It’s the springtime of government, but we are in winter._

The snow fell in slow, behind the window, inside the room.

“Maximilien,” he said. Ah, _ah_ , it came back now. He had said Maximilien at their way to the guillotine. In fact, he said it to himself. Said it to the declaration of ninety-three hanging on that tight tight room with four walls and too many guards. That wasn’t Robespierre’s room, it didn’t mattered, it could be any day.

“Maximilien,” he said. It went back, around and around. “Maximilien.” The man looked back, red cheeks and red jaw, his green eyes under the golden light. He can’t speak. His jaw was red.

“To think it was I who did this,” he said, and was silent for the rest of it. Attached his wrists, cut off his head. It was the easiest thing in the world, for him, for them, for after. It was easier to pretend that Maximilien was not the last word in his mind, those green eyes drown in sea-wine.

He stopped at the people’s insults, halted his steps to think for a moment. He will be dead. He will be dead. Someone was beside him, he wasn’t sure. His head held high like a soldier, then bowed down like a servant, performing _Hieros gamos_. Whispers were everywhere. And so he whispered too, the first time, the last time, whispered for everyone to hear:

_But Maximilien, all things do._

And they were steps, away in the middle of the room, the crowd, the street. The click-clack of the heels, the cutting, the hairs, they fell—

The chest. A chest. The sleeves. Louise would be laughing at him if she saw him like this. His mother was somewhere behind, he thought, where is my mother?

“I am sick,” he said. He looked up and there was Camille, in the spring, his lips curled up, a coffee under his nose. Camille said, you are sick only when you want to, and Saint-Just felt a little bad for agreeing with him.

“I feel like I am dying.”

“Well,” Camille said. “If only.”

The summer breeze was still softly caressing his cheeks when he stood up, bubbles bursting everywhere, covering his vision. He can’t see well. The hair tickled. “My friend,” he started, the taste of it foreign in his tongue, “isn’t— isn’t life— isn’t life—“

And life had been isn’t isn’t isn’t for a long time that day. He can’t make up what he had to say. He never stammered as much. Camille grinned at him the way a child would grin at his finished dinner, proud and waiting for his well deserved compliment.

“ _Isn’t_ it, mon cher?”

And the pear tree was as beautiful and blossoming and as still. 

 

 


End file.
